Between the covers: What's really going on in the world of books

What do Janet Ellis and JK Rowling have in common? Recently, it’s that they have both submitted novels to publishers under pseudonyms. In Rowling’s case it was 2013’s The Cuckoo’s Calling. Now Ellis has been snapped up by Two Roads Press, an imprint of John Murray Publishing, after her agent submitted her first novel under a nom de plume.

The move into authorship isn’t a complete surprise: the former Blue Peter presenter was a judge of the 2012 Costa First Novel award, and is a graduate of the Curtis Brown Creative Writing School. A Little Learning; or, The Butcher’s Hook, is set in late 18th-century London, and the publisher, Lisa Highton, says: “We were hooked by the power of this incredibly vivid story ... It’s by turns slyly witty and quite shocking, with an unforgettable heroine.

I was surprised and delighted to find out the identity of the author, and we’re all excited to help launch the start of a great career.” Publication is scheduled for spring 2016 and a second novel is apparently in the pipeline.

Happy World Book Day to the rest of the world, which celebrates this educational occasion on 23 April. Britain’s National Book Day, aka Annual Dress Up As Harry Potter Day, is in March, to avoid clashing with St George’s Day, but in some countries they embrace this happy coincidence of national pride and lovely bookishness.

For instance in Catalonia, where Sant Jordi is also the patron saint, 23 April is also known as El dia de la Rosa and El dia del Llibre, and traditionally men give women roses and women give men books. Just for the record, Between the Covers is happy to receive books or roses on any day of the year.

The annual VIDA results were published 10 days ago, showing that, as usual, men far outnumber women in UK and US books coverage (though not in the IoS). But coverage of and by “women of colour” was harder to measure, according to a new, spin-off survey. The publication last week of a separate study, Writing the Future: Black and Asian Writers and Publishers in the UK Market Place, portrayed a rather embarrassing image of our publishing industry, which promised to take cultural diversity more seriously after a similar report in 2004.

“I was shocked to find that things have not changed and, in some ways, have gone backwards”, says its author, Danuta Kean. The full report can be found here.